Where Has Steady Freddie Gone? | Baseball Prospectus

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the New York Mets have been rather disappointing this year.

Perhaps “disappointing” falls short, though. Having replaced or let go of most of the old core, the Mets were an odd team coming into the season, a peculiar mixture of youngsters, reclamation projects and rebound candidates, expensive short-term fixes, and also Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor. The latter two, along with the other steady veterans, were supposed to give the roster a baseline upon which the more volatile elements could build. The Mets were in a state of semi-retool but still talented enough to be a good team, the mark of a good organization.

Obviously, that hasn’t happened.

This piece isn’t meant to be a post-mortem or a live diagnosis, mind you. There will be plenty of time for that when fall comes around. But I can’t not mention it. The Mets have already fired their manager, yet haven’t received the fresh manager boost teams sometimes benefit from. The calls for David Stearns’ head are getting deafening, past years of demonstratively good executive work be damned. And while there are too many underachieving parts to single out one or two culprits, some sections of the roster, namely the youngsters and uncertain reclamation projects, are harder to point the finger at. The guys who were supposed to be known quantities, however? Those stand out a little more.

***

Having spent so much time in Milwaukee, David Stearns obviously knew Freddy Peralta very well. He knew what he brought to the table, his strengths and weaknesses, and decided that the free agent-to-be was worth trading a few of his new team’s top 10 prospects for. Jett Williams and Brandon Sproat were both talented, but the Mets system was more than strong enough to not bat an eyelash at their loss. They might not have helped the 2026 Mets, who despite the reshuffling of pieces were still trying to win. New York needed stability. The error bars were wide enough.

Freddy Peralta was meant to provide just that. From his full-time move to the rotation in 2021 to his final season in Wisconsin in 2025, the right-hander struck out almost 30% of batters, never quite 34% but never fewer than 27%, and his walk rate always hovered a smidge over the MLB average. His ERA oscillated between 2.70 and 3.86. He racked up enough strikeouts and walks to keep his innings totals below the true aces, but rarely missed starts. The Mets surely knew what they were getting.

Consistency in results, then, has been a big part of Peralta’s selling point as a pitcher for most of his career. As we’ll soon see, though, this feature makes for an interesting contrast with his style as a pitcher, because little about the way Peralta throws and approaches at-bats indicates he should be capable of being one of baseball’s most steady frontline arms year after year. He just looks and throws like a hurler for whom start-to-start volatility should be loyal companion:

Would you assume that was a reliever’s motion if you didn’t know who Freddy Peralta was? I think I would. Most pitchers who throw exclusively from the stretch do so to minimize moving parts. Not Peralta, though. Everything about his delivery, from the huge leg kick to the big cross-body stride down the mound, to the way he seems to almost fall over during the follow-through, has the look of a pitcher pushing his body to the limit. But Peralta does it very well—it works for him in a way that wouldn’t for most.

Also, there’s a reason I showed you a fastball as the first pitch.

In an era where the number of offerings the average hurler features keeps growing by the day and fastball variety increases, all while total fastball usage reaches record lows, Peralta’s approach has remained mostly unchanged; they don’t call him “Fastball Freddy” for nothing. He’ll throw his fastball to both righties and lefties, in and out of the zone, in any given count, no matter what, well over half the time. He does it largely because it’s a good heater. As you saw, the cross-fire delivery and slingshot release creates odd angles of attack. Paired with solid velocity and movement, Peralta has been able to more or less, well, bully MLB hitters with his best bullet.

This is part of what makes him interesting. He may not look it, but Peralta’s success has always been built on deception and the weird funky characteristics of his delivery as much as anything else. (He’s never averaged more than 94.8 mph on his fastball as a big leaguer, albeit propped up by fantastic extension.) Unlike most funky pitchers, though, his secondaries have never been his calling card. It’s the fastball that has taken Peralta to the stratosphere. It’s done everything for him: whiffs, strikes, damage control. It makes sense for him to stick to it.

As the chart showed, Peralta’s secondaries have always existed in a state of constant experimentation. In recent years, though, the changeup has become Peralta’s preferred no. 2:

StuffPro doesn’t love this pitch, but changeups can be weird to grade. What’s clear about it is Peralta is willing to use it against everyone; each of the last two seasons, the change has been his most used non-fastball versus lefties and righties, yet another quirk in his approach that makes him unique. He doesn’t put it in the zone a whole lot (it won’t be the last time I say those exact words) and I wonder how much of his tendency to show changeups to righties has to do with the lack of a trademark breaking ball.

Peralta’s battles with the glove-side part of his repertoire are a curious part of his career. You expect a dominant strikeout pitcher to have a plus breaker of some sort, but the right-hander doesn’t really possess anything like that. He’s dabbled with a sweeper, a curveball, a shorter slider, a very slow curveball, and sometimes all four at the same time. All share a common thread: not a ton of biting movement and a lack of power.

Interestingly enough, StuffPro likes the breaking stuff better than the changeup. That curveball, slow relative to the fastball, is Peralta’s most used breaker, especially against lefties. The shapes can merge together, though. Would you think this is a sweeper at first glance?

I would probably confuse it with a curveball of some kind, but it’s a sweeper. Peralta also has a shorter slider:

Combined, these three shapes (plus the occasional lollipop curveball) make up roughly 20-25% of Peralta’s offerings, and while they’ve never looked dominant from a visual standpoint, they’ve almost always worked. As a whole, Peralta’s breakers have consistently registered whiff rates north of 40% and very soft contact against. Much like the changeup, Peralta’s spinners are out of the zone more often than not. They don’t generate a huge amount of chases, but they get just enough to keep Peralta around the league average.

About that last point. I’ve already mentioned that Peralta has consistently walked batters at a rate slightly higher than league average throughout his career, but why is that? Some pitchers walk guys because they can’t get them to make poor swing decisions. Others simply don’t throw too many strikes—Peralta, as you might have guessed, is in the latter camp. His approach is not too dissimilar from that of Blake Snell’s, albeit a far less extreme version. Peralta has always tended to stay out of the heart of the zone, nibbling at the corners and rarely giving in, willing to trade more walks for more strikeouts and, crucially, damage control. Thus, the best version of Peralta combines punchouts with more weak contact than most fastball pitchers manage. As many greats prove, that duo is more than enough to overcome the added baserunners.

Zoom out a bit and you can see how the operation works as a whole when it’s firing on all cylinders. Peralta avoids the meat of the plate, which leads to more walks and deeper counts, but his secondaries garner the required swing-and-miss and chase to keep the walks under control. Most importantly, Peralta’s funky, upshot fastball is built for in-zone whiffs and flyball contact, which leads to natural hit suppression via strikeouts and pop-ups. It also makes him more confident when it comes to throwing the fastball in-zone if he falls behind. It’s a strong foundation for success.

This method isn’t infallible, however. Nothing is.

Succeeding while avoiding the heart of the plate as much as Peralta does requires not only the ability to get enough chases on out-of-zone stuff, but also missing bats in the zone and/or being able to control contact quality at a high level. If any of these pieces fails, all of a sudden a pitcher will find himself behind in the count without the required answers. The end result? Either he doubles down on staying away from the plate and his walk rate spikes, or the in-zone offerings he does throw start to get hit and there’s too much good contact happening to keep the additional baserunners from scoring. It’s a balancing act.

This latter scenario is what’s happening to Peralta in New York this season. He’s still walking roughly 9% of batters but, unlike in previous years, he’s not missing enough bats to get away with it. His strikeout rate has dropped from 28.2% in 2025 to 21.8% in 2026—it’s the first time he’s struck out fewer batters than the average pitcher. More batted balls against him are going for hits than ever before. His ERA has ballooned to 4.81 and the Mets have collapsed. He’s given up 25 runs in his last 23 ⅓ innings. Nothing is going how it should. But why?

***

First things first: the peripherals are in agreement that Peralta hasn’t been as bad as his results might indicate.

He does have the highest DRA- of his career, but it’s still 103, within the vicinity of average. Peralta is also running a very low strand rate and the highest BABIP of his career as a starter. No Mets fan will want to hear it at this point, but Peralta has probably been a little unlucky. That’s where the shrug and “that’s baseball” from my part will end, though. Mostly. Because the more I looked into Freddy Peralta’s season and tried to figure out just what on earth was going on, the more I came away with a rather disturbing conclusion: Peralta is doing, more or less, exactly what he’s always done, and it’s just… not working.

I promise I’m not kidding. Peralta’s process, at least as far as how he uses his pitches and how those look, is almost entirely unaltered in 2026. He’s still throwing fastballs more than 50% of the time, changeups to both hands, and a gumbo of breaking balls. His velocity and movement profiles are in line with career norms. His chase rate is actually up slightly! And yet, his whiff rate is 26.1%, the lowest of his career, and his zone contact rate has climbed to an almost perfectly average 82.1%.

Remember how I said Peralta’s ability to control contact quality and quantity in-zone was a core piece of his success? Yeah, that’s no longer a thing. The whiff rate on his fastball is the lowest of his starter tenure. So again, what’s causing this? What’s changed? Has anything changed, in fact, or is most of this variance?

Potential Issue #1: Mechanical Changes

The first thing that jumped out at me when I was looking through Peralta’s data and games was that he’s moving a little differently to what he’s usually done. Both his extension and arm angle are down relative to career norms. What I find interesting, though, is the way the trends look alongside his declining four-seam whiff rates:

Mechanical changes can make me raise an eyebrow when they’re accompanied by downturns in performance—Peralta wouldn’t be the first pitcher to pitch through discomfort and end up making subtle changes to the way he moves in an attempt to push through it. But I doubt this is one of those cases. More likely, I think, is that the slightly lower slot was a conscious choice made in an attempt to improve his fastball, the backbone of his repertoire, by helping Peralta rediscover the flat approach angle with which he’s always excelled. It hasn’t really worked as far as the whiffs are concerned, but the fastball hasn’t been the issue. It’s mainly the slower stuff that’s getting hit. Has the lower slot messed with the way his fastball and slow stuff interact, then? It would make some level of sense. It has certainly changed the way his fastball moves…

Potential Issue #2: Lefties

We’re in the age of multiple fastballs, where it’s exceedingly rare for starters to succeed with just one type of fastball. With his trusty four-seam fastball, Peralta has been an exception to the rule for the longest time—have the trends finally caught up? Is baseball demanding tribute? Would Peralta benefit from a different fastball, perhaps a cutter of some sort?

Or is it as simple as a slight change in movement causing problems? Peralta has always handled lefties just as well as he has righties, until this year; they’ve hit 12 of the 13 homers he’s allowed. The changeup is barely holding Peralta afloat against them, but the breakers and heater are getting cracked. With his new lower slot, the fastball has more arm-side tail than it did last year, and we know from my crash course on fastball movement that the more run a four-seamer has, the more likely it is to feature meaningful platoon splits.

There could be another layer to this. In 2025, Peralta moved from the first base side of the rubber to the third base side and posted a career-low 2.70 ERA. He’s continued the adjustment in New York. Whether it came about as a result of righties crushing his fastball in 2024 or not, we don’t know. What’s clear is that between the move to third base and the cross-body action, Peralta has some of the most extreme horizontal angles of approach against lefties of any pitcher in baseball. This is usually good—outliers are often successful in general and extreme angles of approach tend to lead to poor contact. He’s doing very well against righties… it’s the lefties, which he should handle fine, that are giving him trouble.

Potential Issue #3: Defense

This one is pretty straightforward. Prior to 2026, Peralta had pitched his entire career for Milwaukee, an organization known to prioritize defense. In 2026, however, Peralta is playing for the Mets, who are not exactly filled to the brim with impact fielders. Via Statcast, Peralta has been one of the pitchers most affected by poor defense behind him this year. If you want to underperform your peripherals, regardless of whether they’re a little worse or not, playing in front of a bad defensive team is a good way to do it.

***

Where has Steady Freddy gone, then? When I set out to answer this question, I thought I would find at least one or two definitive answers. Something in the data or the film would pop, I told myself. It’s the most satisfying kind of article I write: a clear problem to solve, a clear cause, and a clear solution. Point, set, match.

I don’t think Freddy Peralta is one of those cases. His approach remains fundamentally good, at least on a macro scale, and it’s not like he’s suddenly lacking the tools to make it work. The fixes here are more peripheral. As always, Peralta could do with a better breaking ball. (A tight gyro slider would serve him well.) A cutter would be an interesting addition in theory, but could he throw one good enough to be worth using over what he currently has? He could certainly throw a few more strikes—2026 has probably pushed him too far toward the “I’m not giving you hittable pitches” thing, but how much of that is intent and how much is something as simple as a slump being magnified by poor sequencing?

Ultimately, I think Freddy Peralta is still a good pitcher. He’s always been a good pitcher. Good pitchers, like good hitters, slump. Maybe his execution improves and he has a 3.12 ERA the rest of the way. But as good and reliable as he’s been for so long, I don’t think he’s ever truly been a superstar, and while I don’t think the Mets’ front office expected star production, maybe the fanbase did. I don’t know. What I do know is that for me, Peralta is a stark reminder of how delicate the balancing act of a good baseball player can really be. No one pillar needs to be destroyed completely. All it takes is a little wear and tear, some decay, some momentary misuse, and suddenly it looks like the sky’s falling. But it’s not. Not for the Mets, who will be back, and not for Peralta, who could very well be working on his return as we speak.